Down the Rabbit Hole

For the historical novelist – for anyone interested in history – the internet has brought about a revolution. We are floating in a sea of information that deepens and spreads minute by minute. It’s incredibly empowering, but it also has its dangers.

If you came of age before the internet, you will remember how things were. An argument over supper about any given war could not be resolved by opening a laptop. If it was a Saturday night, you were most probably clueless until Monday, when you could call a reference librarian or go there yourself. A million questions, small and large, simply remained unanswered, and we lived with that. The capital of Peru, the author of Antigone, where Napoleon was held captive, when women got the vote – if you didn’t have access to a good encyclopedia, you wondered or started calling friends in the vain hope that one of them would know when Wrigley Field was built.

Since that time, we have gone from one extreme to the other. At two in the morning I can crawl through newspaper archives to find out the rent on a typical three bedroom apartment in Manhattan in the year 1900. I can look at museum exhibits on Edwardian dress or Bronze Age artifacts, or read an article on bovine diseases. As more and more becomes available on-line, things only get better. Or worse, depending on your perspective. My husband, the Mathematician, has developed a particular expression he puts on whenever I start a sentence did you know: Just interested enough to prove that he is listening; just distant enough to discourage me from telling him exactly how pencils were manufactured in 1800. If I’m particularly animated about something I’ve found, he will raise an eyebrow a half inch or so to acknowledge my discovery.

And that’s fair enough. I don’t understand anything about his work, either.

For writers of historical fiction, there is a Too Much of a Good Thing Syndrome. You look up a particular murder trial that happened in 1799 because you need to know how lawyers addressed each other; three hours later you finishing reading about horse breeding in Turkey and can’t remember what you wanted in the first place, or why.

A scene you’ve been trying to write for days simply will not come together. You decide that the reason for this is simple: you don’t have enough background information. In a part of your brain you are ignoring you know that the scene may not belong in the story, or the characterization might have taken a wrong turn, but these are thorny problems that make a writer anxious. It’s much easier to try to find out when they started using screens on windows to keep out flies. (Something I haven’t been able to track down, by the way).

Curiosity is, of course, a good thing. It’s when curiosity and compulsion get together that research starts to overshadow story. I think of it as the fraternity hazing syndrome: It took me hours and hours of work to learn how to make a boot, and by God, you’re going to learn it, too.

Most usually we couch it differently. When the editor asks, so very gently, if maybe the research is getting in the way, you stand up to defend not yourself, but your readers. Of course they will be interested in the way Egyptians irrigated their crops, this is fascinating stuff.

When you hear yourself saying – or just thinking – that kind of thing, you must recognize that you are in trouble. Your characters are being neglected, your story arc is in danger of collapsing. The simple truth is that just because the information is available doesn’t mean you have to use it.

But there is hope. It turns out that the internet is both the cause of, and the solution to, this problem.*

If you find yourself luxuriating in two hundred year old classified ads for Restorative Liquors, don’t burden your story with all those glorious details. Use the smallest possible bit, and then take the rest of it and post it on a weblog.

Weblogs are easily set up, and can be had for no cost at all. You can start one in ten minutes, and then use that space to share all the bits and pieces you have collected so lovingly. Readers who would have been irritated by a long description of early treatments for syphillis will come of their own free will to your weblog to read about such things, and (another bonus) discuss it. The internet is not just a gigantic, 24/7/365 encyclopedia, it is also a communication tool, and a way for writers and authors to reach out to old readers and win over new ones.

You are absolutely correct, Rosina! I long ago discovered the truth in what you say and designed a website around my obsessive curiosity about the past. When that didn’t blunt my cravings, I created a blog. The two have taken the edge off, but the beast still lurks just below the surface, waiting to break free on the slimmest of pretenses and transport me back in time.

Nurse Jane Delano, after graduating in 1886, put window screens in a hospital in Florida during a yellow fever epidemic.

This reference was on page 9 of a Google search: “history of window screens in Florida.”

Yes, I certainly appreciate researching online. I remember way back when German was a graduation requirement so we chemists could research organic chemical reactions in Beilstein. Pounds and pounds of volumes and volumes all in German. And every “literate” household had an encyclopedia which got a yearly book added of the year’s current events.

“For writers of historical fiction, there is a Too Much of a Good Thing Syndrome. You look up a particular murder trial that happened in 1799 because you need to know how lawyers addressed each other; three hours later you finishing reading about horse breeding in Turkey and can’t remember what you wanted in the first place, or why.”

This made me laugh, because it happens to me at least once a week.

I also have problems with footnotes, endnotes, and Works Cited glossaries. A juicy factoid can reveal many texts associated with it—pretty soon I’ve got a knee high pile of books to go through just to find out how a loom got warped.

I found myself shaking my head as I read, remembering all sort of moments where I’ve done just as you described. Your suggestion of blogging the tidbits is excellent. Next time I learn how to poison someone in the Victorian era, I know where I’ll put it!

Great post, Rosina. Welcome! I’ve heard the research for a novel described in terms of an iceberg. The whole iceberg is the author’s entire research. The small part of the iceberg above the water is the bit of the research that actually appears in the book.